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Beyond the Politics of Civility and Trauma: The End of Higher Education as We Know It

by Henry A. Giroux

The academy is entering a dangerous time. Academics now find themselves entering a time when a more comprehensive politics that deals with the rise of authoritarianism through a variety of related fundamentalisms–economic, religious, political, and educational–is being overlooked as a result of an emerging limited and depoliticizing politics of civility and trauma. This is not meant to suggest that dehumanizing behavior and injurious forms of trauma do not matter and should not be addressed. What is disturbing is when such incidents lose their sense of specificity and connections to wider political and economic forces and become universalized and all-encompassing.

Frozen in time and space, this narrow view of politics functions largely to inflict injury against a broader politics and its myraid victims rather than respond to such injuries within a context in which they can be truly addressed. If a politics of civility substitutes conformity and the personal for the political, the politics of trauma collapses the political into the therapeutic. In both cases, the personal universalizes its own narrow privatizing interests and smothers dissent, elevates conformity and the therapeutic as the most viable political practice and in doing so fuels a form of political purity that undercuts any type of broad-based pedagogy of disruption.